A Senate Star Sparkles Less On the Stump

By MICHAEL COOPER

Published: October 9, 2007

As he strode into a coffee-and-scones meeting with the Jasper County Democrats the other night in Newton, Iowa, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. slipped off his suit jacket and unknotted his tie.

''Folks, I apologize if I'm a little overdressed,'' Mr. Biden told the small group.

The senator explained that he had just barely caught the direct flight from Washington to Des Moines that evening, ''since neither Hillary nor Barack will lend me their G5 jets,'' and that there had been no time to change. ''I got in the plane -- I was meeting with President Talabani, you know, he's the Kurdish leader in Iraq, and I literally ran from that meeting in the Capitol.''

It pretty much summed up the two worlds that Mr. Biden inhabits these days.

In Washington Mr. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, helps set the terms of the debate on Iraq, pushing for a looser federalist system there that has won the support of the Senate, and the ire of the Bush administration.

But on the campaign trail he is struggling to draw crowds and coverage to help him get heard above rivals who are so well known that their first names -- Hillary and Barack -- suffice.

It is a plight familiar to quite a few candidates who find themselves at the back of the Democratic pack this year -- candidates who barely register in news accounts of the campaign despite impressive r?m?that distinguish them from many of the more unorthodox also-rans of campaigns past.

Even with their considerable credentials, Democrats like Mr. Biden; Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former ambassador to the United Nations; and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the chairman of the banking committee, find themselves lumped in with the kind of candidates who are usually unable to break into public consciousness unless they fall off a stage at a pancake breakfast or suffer some other mishap. For them it is a vicious circle: low poll numbers discourage news coverage, and a lack of coverage makes raising poll numbers difficult.

''I didn't think, to use a trite expression, that all the oxygen would be sucked out of the air for so long,'' Mr. Biden said in an interview. And breaking through, he said, is difficult because his campaign has received such little attention from national reporters, especially compared with the wall-to-wall coverage his race for president drew two decades ago. ''I thought you guys would be out here a lot sooner,'' he said.

Of course it did not help that Mr. Biden's campaign got off to a wince-worthy start when, the day of his announcement, a furor broke out over his remark that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was ''the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,'' which offended many.

Since then, for all his ubiquity on the Sunday political shows and his well-received debate performances, he has trailed three formidable opponents in both fund-raising and attention: Mr. Obama, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

So now Mr. Biden, 64, is courting Iowa voters in breakfasts and lunches of a dozen here, a few dozen there. At each stop he makes the case that in a time of war, Democrats need a nominee with unimpeachable foreign policy credentials who also can do well in Republican states. And he warns Democrats not to be lulled by President Bush's unpopularity and the perceived weakness of the Republican field of candidates.

''This idea that we're just going to nominate anyone and they're automatically going to win is, I think, a little na?,'' he told a small group at breakfast in Fort Madison on Friday.

So Mr. Biden has begun engaging Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, asking at nearly every stop how they can square their recent votes to stop financing the war in Iraq -- Mr. Biden voted to continue the financing -- with their recent concessions that they cannot guarantee all the troops will be home by 2013.

Over the summer, when Mr. Obama called for striking at terrorist camps in Pakistan if the Pakistanis fail to do so, Mr. Biden questioned his foreign policy acumen by saying that he was describing existing policy. And Mr. Biden, who calls Mrs. Clinton a friend, said in the interview that even though he did not blame her for being a polarizing figure, it should concern voters who want to see a Democrat elected president.

''It's really not her fault,'' he said of the strong reaction toward Mrs. Clinton over the years. ''But you know, and people know, there is going to be that great 'vast right wing conspiracy' -- it's going to mobilize. And I think people are going to start sitting there thinking, whoa, wait a minute. Do we want to go there again?''

At several stops he sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton's recent vote to name the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a sponsor of terrorism. ''The idea of giving the president an excuse to be able to go to war with Iran I found absolutely mindless,'' he said. ''I was dumbfounded when Hillary voted for it.''

Before Mr. Biden can be seen as an alternative, though, he has other hurdles to jump. Mr. Edwards is making similar electability arguments against Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, and has more money and higher poll ratings. Mr. Richardson, who has also out-raised Mr. Biden, is also running on foreign policy expertise.

Mr. Biden's bid to run as the steady, experienced foreign policy hand was not strengthened last winter when he was forced to explain his remarks about Mr. Obama.

Correction: October 10, 2007, Wednesday
A front-page article yesterday about the presidential campaign of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. misstated the year he ended a previous campaign for president. It was 1987, not 1988.